The Parades | review by Stephen Theaker

After a huge earthquake hits Japan, a 35-year-old single mother and journalist, Minako (Masami Nagasawa), drowns in the subsequent tsunami. Not that she realises at first. She wakes up on a beach strewn with wreckage and of course her first thought is to find Ryo, her seven-year-old son. Rescue workers ignore her questions. So do survivors, and a colleague from work. The first person to acknowledge her is her colleague’s daughter – because the little girl died too. Later, as Minako searches through the rubble, a young man, Akira (Kentarô Sakaguchi), calls to her from his van. He can see her, and she can touch his arm. She’s in such a state that he offers her a lift to where he is staying, a cosy outdoor bar in a little fairground in the middle of nowhere. He tells her it’s a gathering place for people like them, by which he means those who died with regrets and aren’t ready to move on.

Cackle by Rachel Harrison (Berkley) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Aimless woman desperate for a man finds mysterious woman desperate for a friend in dully taught lesson on female autonomy.

Cackle is a call for women to stop kowtowing to men and to develop their own voices. Unfortunately, excepting a charming spider and some unruly teens, the story isn’t all that interesting.

Lisa Frankenstein | review by Stephen Theaker

1989: the unfortunately named Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) has a new home and a new school. When Lisa was a little younger, her mum was killed by an axe murderer. Her dad has now married Janet (Carla Gugino), a nasty piece of work who thinks very little of Lisa. Stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) does her best to be nice but isn’t very good at it. After another girl deliberately gives Lisa a spiked drink at a party, and her science lab partner sexually assaults her, she takes a shortcut home through her favourite graveyard. She wishes she could be with the subject of her favourite bit of statuary, a piano player who died young in 1837 (Cole Sprouse, one half of the little kid in Big Daddy).

Madame Web | review by Stephen Theaker

Madame Web has been given a lot of stick for being a bad superhero film, which in my view is a complete misunderstanding of what it is. It’s not a superhero film at all, it’s a comedy horror thriller that takes place in a superhero universe. Comics readers are very used to this kind of thing, but it seems to have baffled some filmgoers. Imagine a Final Destination film, but where nearly all the heroine’s psychic visions are of the same disaster: an evil Spider-Man type called Ezekiel murdering everyone he gets his hands on, in one location after another. Admittedly, he is the film’s weakest link (the animation of his movements looks clumsy, and it sounds as if his dialogue has been dubbed by someone else), but, overall, like Morbius, the film is very far from being the complete disaster that some would have you think.

ProleSCARYet: Tales of Horror and Class Warfare edited by Ian Bain, Anthony Engebretson, J.R. Handfield, Eric Raglin, and Marcus Woodman (Rad Flesh Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Overlords in saviours’ clothing: anthology takes a shot at capitalism with mixed results.

Despite its silly title, this horror anthology sympathises with those fed up with monied capitalists trying to take control of their lives, mostly in office and retail environments. It’s full of low earners (pizza deliverers, landscapers, gas station attendants, baristas) trying to make ends meet while suffering at the hands of the wealthy. In some stories, members of the upper class get their way, while, in others, the “rich fucks”, as one author puts it, pay their dues.

Poor Things | review by Stephen Theaker

A woman tries to commit suicide, throwing herself off a bridge. We later find out that she was pregnant, with a husband who would have driven anyone to despair. Her body is recovered by Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), God for short. While watching, given that Godwin was Mary Shelley's maiden name, I assumed him to be Frankenstein's monster, now a mad scientist himself, but if so or not, he had a father who performed similarly ghastly experiments on him. Now he continues the family tradition, performing ghastly miracles such as binding the head of a pig to the body of a chicken, or reanimating the body of a suicidal woman by using the brain of her unborn baby.

For All Mankind, Season 4 | review by Stephen Theaker

Season 4 of For All Mankind, Apple's big-budget alternate-history science fiction show, jumps forward eight years. In their world, Stanley Kubrick finished AI: Artificial Intelligence himself, John Lennon played the Superbowl half-time show, and the USA got its first lesbian president. In 1995, humans had barely a toehold on Mars and a bomb had devastated NASA's command centre. In 2003, the multi-national Mars colony is well-established and the next stop planned is asteroid mining. After an early attempt ends in disaster, it takes a particularly valuable prize to get things going again.

Though we barely see Jodi Balfour as President Waverley in this season (Al Gore now being President), and many other major characters have died or retired along the way, there are some survivors from the late 1960s. Astronaut Ed Baldwin is a cranky old man now; hardly a surprise since he was such a cranky young man. Joel Kinnamon's performance conveys the character's age better than his rather dusty make-up. He doesn't want to leave Mars, especially with his daughter and grandson on the way there. He's not happy when old friend Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) is sent from Earth to become his boss. Her instinct was to decline the job, but she returns to service out of duty.

Barbarians of the Beyond by Matthew Hughes (Spatterlight) | review by Stephen Theaker

About twenty-five years ago, in the year 1499 (New Reckoning) five of the galaxy's worst criminals, known collectively as the Demon Princes, led their henchmen in an attack on a farming colony, Mount Pleasant, on the world of Providence, leaving many dead and taking the rest as slaves. Such is the nature of life in the Beyond, beyond the civilised safety of the Oikumene worlds.

The parents of Morwen Sabine were among those taken, and sold into slavery, ending up in the possession of Hacheem Belloch, on Blatcher's World. And it was into slavery that Morwen was born. We join her subsequent to her escape, as she arrives on Providence, and makes her way back to the former home of her parents. They left something of value there, hidden in her tree, that might help bring them home.

Such a Pretty Smile by Kristi DeMeester (St. Martin’s Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Unrequited love and somnambulant sculpting: alternating timelines explore mother/daughter bonds and suppression of women’s voices.

Such a Pretty Smile tells the stories of a mother and daughter dealing with a variety of threats, the most dangerous of which is a serial killer called The Cur. On a deeper level, the novel comments on women having their voices stifled in a society that drives them towards certain behaviours and activities. 

Like many recent horror novels, the action alternates between two timelines. In 2019, eighth-grader Lila Sawyer – a surname with clear implications – has a crush on her attractive but self-absorbed classmate Macie, who is more interested in Cameron, a junior in high school. Macie tries to push Cameron’s awkward brother Andrew onto Lila. To top it off, a murderer who kills young girls is on the prowl. 

All of Us Strangers | review by Stephen Theaker

All of Us Strangers tells the story of Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay writer in his forties, living alone in an empty London apartment block. He writes for film, and, when he has to (as he puts it), for television. He's trying to write a script about his childhood, but struggling, so he heads back to his home town to see his parents. Anyone who has seen the trailer will know already that his parents (played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) died in a car crash when he was a child. The film, however, doesn't tell you that they died until after we have met them, though one might guess from the conversation and their relative youth. Adam doesn't seem surprised to meet them, nor do they seem surprised to meet him, though they are aware that time has gone on without them.

In London, a nice chap knocks on Adam's door with a bottle of whiskey, looking for company. They are apparently the only people to have moved into the building yet and the silence is freaking him out. Harry (Paul Mescal) is from a younger generation, but bears similar emotional scars. Adam hates being called queer, because it was an insult thrown at him by bullies in the 1980s. Harry hates being called gay, because it was an all-purpose insult during the Chris Moyles era. Adam went a long time without ever having penetrative sex, because of AIDS, but for Harry's generation HIV would no longer be a death sentence and PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) drugs can prevent transmission. Though Adam understandably turns the drunk young man away at first, he later invites him over, and a tender relationship develops between them.

Eventually, Adam takes Harry to meet his parents.

Badland Hunters | review by Stephen Theaker

Although not a direct sequel, this South Korean film is set in the world of Concrete Utopia, which doesn't seem to have had a UK release. Based on a comic called Pleasant Bullying by Kim Soong-nyung, the previous film apparently showed the aftermath of an earthquake striking Seoul so hard that all the skyscrapers collapsed. People tried their best to survive in a devastated urban environment, to build some kind of order among the chaos, but things went awry: a Sight and Sound review described it as "a Ballardian story set in a post-apocalyptic apartment complex".

I doubt many reviewers will use "Ballardian" to describe Netflix's Badland Hunters, which is a self-consciously pulpy and over-the-top affair. A prologue shows us that, when the earthquake hit, mad scientist Yang Gi-Su was trying to resurrect his daughter. Three years later, by which time a drought has added to everyone's problems, he is still mad-sciencing away, and with the help of soldiers has taken over an apartment block that still stands. With his new experiments, Yang Gi-Su aims to create humans who can survive the extended periods of dehydration and malnutrition that are practically inevitable in this dry new world.

Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz, by Joe Dever | review by Rafe McGregor

Holmgard Press, hardback, £19.99, November 2022, ISBN 9781915586056

I’ve been delaying my review of the most recently published collector’s edition because I was hoping to be able to report that Holmgard Press had achieved at least one of its goals: that either the whole cycle of thirty-two Lone Wolf gamebooks had been published or that a large proportion of the cycle was back in print. Unfortunately, both goals remain in development at the time of writing. Regarding availability, there are now three editions circulating: original (paperback and secondhand only), collector’s (hardback and secondhand only), and definitive (which can be purchased from Holmgard Press, Amazon, and no doubt other online bookstores). The only definitive editions in print at the time of writing are books 1 to 12, 1 to 5 (the Kai series) in hardback and paperback and 6 to 12 (the Magnakai series) in hardback. Books 13 to 20 (the Grand Master series) are relatively easy to find on the secondhand market (and usually not extortionate, for the original editions anyway), but books 21 to 31 (the New Order series) less so. People seem to be hanging on to the Holmgard Press Collector’s Editions pretty tightly and I’ve not seen any copies of books 28 to 31 available for a while now. The original edition of Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz (which was published by Red Fox in 1998) reached a peak price of £1894 on the secondhand market in February 2022, but both original and collector’s editions are now completely unavailable fourteen months after the publication of the latter. Regarding the completion of the series, Lone Wolf 32: Light of the Kai is going to be released in two parts, which Holmgard aims to publish in October 2024 and October 2025 respectively. I have to ask why. Two parts mean that Joe Dever’s original conception of a thirty-book cycle has been changed to thirty-three, but the press’s stated intention is the posthumous realisation of his vision (Dever sadly passed away in 2016). I am also concerned that the perceived need to publish the final book in two parts is evidence of an exacerbation of the source of my criticism of Lone Wolf 31: The Dusk of Eternal Night, which I reviewed in TQF69. Finally, 2024 is the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Lone Wolf 1: Flight from the Dark (yes, that does make me feel old) and it would have been great to have the cycle completed in such an auspicious year.

The Lost Village: A Novel by Camilla Sten (Minotaur Books) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Strong storytelling compensates for tired concept. 

The Lost Village unites stories from two different timelines. The present-day component covers the danger that unfolds while Alice Lindstedt’s crew shoots a teaser for a documentary about the decades-abandoned Swedish village of Silvertjarn. There is a threat out there, and we’re not sure whether it’s human or supernatural. 

The second piece gradually reveals what happened to this mining town in the 1950s, as well as the story of the birth of a mysterious baby that was left when nearly nine hundred people disappeared. 

What happened? Was this a mass suicide? Mass migration? Was it aliens? Russians coming in and kidnapping them? Alice wants to get to the bottom of this mystery. Author Camilla Sten faces the challenge of creating something new in the arguably oversaturated film-crew-encounters-threat-while-documenting-mysterious-setting horror market. The present story, told from Alice’s perspective in first person present, takes a while to get going — there’s a lot of walking around the site and not much happening to suggest the place is dangerous. Where Sten makes up for that, however, is in the conflicts between Alice and Emmy, whose friendship with Alice was shattered by something that happened in college. This tension will mount as Alice continues to make decisions that put her team at risk. Other crew members include Emma’s boyfriend Robert, Max (interested in Alice), and Tone, an amateur photographer about whom Alice withholds critical information from the others.  

The past story unfolds in third-person narration from the perspective of Alice’s great grandmother Elsa. One of Elsa’s daughters, Margarete (also Alice’s grandmother), has already left Silvertjarn when handsome and charismatic Pastor Mattias arrives and captivates many villagers, chief among them Elsa’s younger daughter Aina. Relationships deteriorate as the pastor’s influence intensifies. 

As the climax approaches, Sten steps up the tension by quickly flipping between timelines. 

The Lost Village does not top the charts in terms of scare factor. Rather, its strength lies in its handling of complex relationships and susceptibility to silver-tongued leaders.—Douglas J. Ogurek ***

Hanu-Man | review by Stephen Theaker

The first film in what is hoped to be a new superhero universe, Hanu-Man introduces us to Hanumanthu (played with a good deal of charm by Teja Sajja), a feckless young man who amuses himself with petty larceny, and feeds himself by taking the food his sister (Varalaxmi Sarathkumar) makes, and insulting her while he does it. They live in a picturesque mountain village called Anjanadri, which might be a nice place to live were it not for the village champion, who demands a tax and engages those who protest in wrestling bouts to the death.

Hanumanthu is sweet on Meenakshi (Amritha Aiyer), who has returned from the city to spend the summer. After she incurs the wrath of the village champion, skull-wearing bandits attack a coach she is on and brutally murder the other passengers. Hanumanthu, in saving her, gets himself stabbed, kicked off a cliff, and likely to drown, but a kindly god takes note of his heroism. In the water, Hanumanthu is drawn to a pearl, a magic pearl that formed around a drop of the monkey god Hanuman's blood, a pearl which will heal his wounds and grant him the strength to fight.

As long as it's sunny in Anjanadri, that is...